The present invention relates to methods for determining a call traffic pattern for a company having a plurality of facilities.
In the modern economy, many business entities have a plurality of remotely located facilities. Each of these plurality of facilities are equipped with phone service over public switched telephone networks (xe2x80x9cPSTNxe2x80x9d) for communication by phone with each other as well as for communication with the rest of the outside world. For long distance telephone service, the company will choose a long distance carrier (xe2x80x9cLDCxe2x80x9d), such as SPRINT, MCI, ATandT, etc., that will be accessed over the PSTN.
The LDC provides the company with a monthly phone bill for all long distance calls made by the company. The phone bill may include a listing of all billed individual call originating numbers, terminating numbers, duration, associated charge, and time of occurrence. As a given company may have a large number of facilities each with a large number of phones, the monthly phone bill may be extremely large. Typically, one bill is delivered for a domestic corporation covering phone records for all facilities. For convenience, the bill is often presented in digital form on magnetic or optical computer readable disks. Depending on the size of the billed company and associated call volume, it is not uncommon for these bills to include hundreds of thousands of individual phone records. These digital phone bills are commonly known as call data records, and are provided in a number of formats.
In recent times, alternatives to LDC and PSTN services have begun to emerge for two way telephony voice communication. As an example, practical methods have recently been developed for providing intra-company voice telephony communication over a data network between remote facilities. In order to effectively configure and manage a data network for such telephony communication, information regarding the company telephone calling traffic is required.
This information may be characterized as a xe2x80x9ccall traffic patternxe2x80x9d. A call traffic pattern may comprise the volume, duration, peak usage, as well as other information regarding telephony communication between individual company facilities. With such information, a data network may be configured with the proper bandwidth and portal capacity to accommodate expected telephony traffic.
The most convenient place to obtain such information is from a LDC phone bill. Unfortunately, no methods are heretofore known for effectively and conveniently extracting the required information from a LDC pone bill and developing a call traffic pattern with the extracted information.
It is an object of the invention to provide a method for developing a call traffic pattern.
The present invention comprises a method for developing a call traffic pattern for a company having a plurality of remote facilities. The method generally comprises the s steps of obtaining a company phone bill, extracting from the phone bill a subset of call records comprising all intra-company phone call records, compiling a plurality of secondary call record groupings from the intra-company subset, each individual of the secondary groupings comprising intra-company call records for calls originating from one of, and preferably from each of, the plurality of facilities; and using the secondary groupings to develop a call traffic pattern.
The call traffic pattern Generally comprises a facility by facility record and analysis of intra-company calls. Preferably, data from the individual call records are preferably compiled, summed, and summarized on a facility by facility basis within the call traffic pattern. The preferred traffic pattern comprises total charges for intra-company calls made from each facility, total number of calls made from each facility, total duration of calls made from each facility, peak time of occurrence for calls made from each facility, peak usage for calls made from each facility, and total calls terminating at each facility.
As a company phone bill may be quite large, and may in fact contain the records of hundreds of thousands of individual phone calls, the phone bill is preferably obtained in a computer readable format such as on a magnetic or optically readable disk. The most common LDC""s use formats for such bills, which are generally known as call detail records. For example, ATandT provides its corporate customers a phone bill in CD ROM format, under the ATandT tradename xe2x80x9cBilling Edgexe2x80x9d. LDC""s such as Sprint, MCI Worldcom, and Quest also provide phone bills in computer readable format. The formats used by each LDC tend to be different.
Additionally, in a most preferred embodiment, the method of the invention comprises the further step of programming a computer to accept the computer readable phone bill as input and to perform the steps of the method as generally outlined above. As used herein, the term xe2x80x9ccomputerxe2x80x9d is intended to include virtually any device having a central processing unit, and may include, by way of example, personal computers, mainframe computers, handheld computers, as well as devices programmed for a specific purpose having a central processing unit.
The call traffic pattern developed through the method of the invention is particularly useful as a design tool in designing a digital telephony intra-company network.
The above brief description sets forth rather broadly the more important features of the present disclosure so that the detailed description that follows may be better understood, and so that the present contributions to the art may be better appreciated. There are, of course, additional features of the disclosure that will be described hereinafter which will form the subject matter of the claims appended hereto. In this respect, before explaining the several embodiments of the disclosure in detail, it is to be understood that the disclosure is not limited in its application to the details of the construction and the arrangements set forth in the following description or illustrated in the drawings. The present invention is capable of other embodiments and of being practiced and carried out in various ways, as will be appreciated by those skilled in the art. Also, it is to be understood that the phraseology and terminology employed herein are for description and not limitation.